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đ€Ż The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse
đ White privilege – a guide for parents
đ©âđ» Working from home could lead to more prejudice, report warns
đ© The radical aristocrat who put kindness on a scientific footing
Quotation-as-title by Marcus Aurelius. Image from top-linked post.
đ€ Medieval English people used to pay their rent in eels
đ€ș The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports Among Ivy LeagueâObsessed Parents
đ Archaeologists unearth ‘huge number’ of sealed Egyptian sarcophagi
đ 3D model of how the Charles bridge in Prague was constructed
đȘ Every Man Should Be Able to Save His Own Life: 5 Fitness Benchmarks a Man Must Master
Quotation by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Image from top-linked post.
âïž What does it mean to be a man in 2020? Introducing our news series on masculinity
âïž Your writing style is costly (Or, a case for using punctuation in Slack)
Quotation-as-title by Elizabeth Bransco. Image from top-linked post.
One way of thinking about the pandemic is as inevitable, and just one of a series of life-changing events that will happen to you during your time on earth.
Whereas some people seem to think that life should be trouble- and pain-free, it’s clear by even a cursory glance at history that this an impossible expectation.
This article is a useful one for reframing the pandemic as a change that we’re literally all going through together, but which will affect us differently:
Transitions feel like an abnormal disruption to life, but in fact they are a predictable and integral part of it. While each change may be novel, major life transitions happen with clocklike regularity. Life is one long string of them, in fact. The author Bruce Feiler wrote a book called Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age. After interviewing hundreds of people about their transitions, he found that a major change in life occurs, on average, every 12 to 18 months. Huge onesâwhat Feiler calls âlifequakesââhappen three to five times in each personâs life. Some lifequakes are voluntary and joyful, such as getting married or having a child. Others are involuntary and unwelcome, such as unemployment or life-threatening illness.
Arthur C. Brooks, The Clocklike Regularity of Major Life Changes (The Atlantic)
As usual, I’m taking a month off Thought Shrapnel duties during the month of August. So this is my last post for a few weeks.
In the meantime, consider deactivating your Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts. See how it makes you feel, and perhaps I’ll run into you on the Fediverse? (start here)
There are major issues of transparency and authenticity here because the beliefs and opinions donât actually belong to the digital models, they belong to the modelsâ creators. And if the creators canât actually identify with the experiences and groups that these models claim to belong to (i.e., person of color, LGBTQ, etc.), then do they have the right to actually speak on those issues? Or is this a new form of robot cultural appropriation, one in which digital creators are dressing up in experiences that arenât theirs?
Sinead Bovell (Vogue)
This is an incredible article that looks at machine learning and AI through the lens of an industry I hadn’t thought of as being on the brink of being massively disrupted by technology.
It is strange that âcancel cultureâ has become a project of the left, which spent the 20th century fighting against capricious firings of âtroublesomeâ employees. A lack of due process does not become a moral good just because you sometimes agree with its targets. We all, I hope, want to see sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination decrease. But we should be aware of the economic incentives here, particularly given the speed of social media, which can send a video viral, and see onlookers demand a response, before the basic facts have been established. Afraid of the reputational damage that can be incurred in minutes, companies are behaving in ways that range from thoughtless and uncaring to sadistic.
[…]
If you care about progressive causes, then woke capitalism is not your friend. It is actively impeding the cause, siphoning off energy, and deluding us into thinking that change is happening faster and deeper than it really is. When people talk about the âexcesses of the leftââa phenomenon that blights the electoral prospects of progressive parties by alienating swing votersâin many cases theyâre talking about the jumpy overreactions of corporations that arenât left-wing at all.
Helen Lewis (The Atlantic)
Cancel culture is problematic, and mainly because of the unequal power structures involved. This is an important read. See also this article by Albert Wenger which has some suggestions towards the end in this regard.
The goal of productivity is to get the things you have to get done finished so you can spend more time on the things you want to do. Donât fall into the busy trap, where you judge your self-worth by how productive you are or how much youâve contributed to your company or manager. Weâre all just trying to keep our heads above water. I hope these tips will help you do the same.
Alan Henry (WIRED)
As I wrote yesterday on my personal blog, I have a bit of an issue with perfectionism. So this reminder, along with the other great advice in the article, was a timely reminder.
If you treat somebody with disdain, of course, you give that person a psychological incentive to diminish your opinion and to want you to be less powerful. Inversely, if you demonstrate understanding and appreciation of someoneâs contribution, you create a psychological incentive in the individual to give greater weight to your opinion. And that person will want to strengthen the weight of your opinion in the eyes of others. Appreciation and gratitude breed appreciation and gratitude.
Bruce Tulgan (Fast Company)
Creating a productive, psychologically safe, and emotionally intelligent environment means thanking people for the work they do. That means for their day-to-day activities, not just when they put in a herculean effort. A paycheck is not thanks enough for the work we do and the value we provide.
More interesting still is that nostalgia can bring to mind time-periods we didnât directly experience. In the film Midnight in Paris (2011), Gil is overwhelmed by nostalgic thoughts about 1920s Paris â which he, a modern-day screenwriter, hasnât experienced â yet his feelings are nothing short of nostalgic. Indeed, feeling nostalgic for a time one didnât actually live through appears to be a common phenomenon if all the chatrooms, Facebook pages and websites dedicated to it are anything to go by. In fact, a new word has been coined to capture this precise variant of nostalgia â anemoia, defined by the Urban Dictionary and the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows as ânostalgia for a time youâve never knownâ.
How can we make sense of the fact that people feel nostalgia not only for past experiences but also for generic time periods? My suggestion, inspired by recent evidence from cognitive psychology and neuroscience, is that the variety of nostalgiaâs objects is explained by the fact that its cognitive component is not an autobiographical memory, but a mental simulation â an imagination, if you will â of which episodic recollections are a sub-class.
Nigel Warburton (Aeon)
In the UK at least, shows like Downton Abbey and Call The Midwife are popular. My view of this is that, as this article would seem to support, it’s a kind of nostalgia for a time that was imagined to be better.
There’s a sinister side to this, as well. This kind of nostalgia seems to be particularly prevalent among more conservative-leaning (white) people harking back to a time of greater divisions in society along race and class lines. I think it’s rather disturbing.
Quiet Parks International (QPI) is a nonprofit working to establish certification for quiet parks to raise awareness of and preserve quiet places. The fledgling organizationâwhose members include audio engineers, scientists, environmentalists, and musiciansâhas identified at least 262 sites worldwide, including 30 in the US, that it believes are quiet or could become so with management changes….
QPI has no regulatory authority, but like the International Dark Sky Associationâs Dark Sky Parks initiative, the nonprofit believes its certificationâgranted only after a detailed, three-day sound analysisâcan encourage public support of preservation efforts and provide guidelines for protection. âThe places that are quiet today ⊠are basically leftoversâplaces that are out of the way,â Quiet Parks cofounder Gordon Hempton says.
Jenny Morber (WIRED)
I live in a part of the world close to both a designated Dark Sky Park and mountains into which I can escape. Light and noise pollution threaten both of them, so I’m glad to hear of these efforts.
Header image by Uillian Vargas
When sitting down to put together this week’s round-up, which is coming to you slightly later than usual because of <gestures indeterminately> all this, I decided that I’d only focus on things that are positive; things that might either raise a smile or make you think “oh, interesting!”
Let me know if I’ve succeeded in the comments below, via Twitter, Mastodon, or via email!
The real advantage of going with a launcher like this instead of a more traditional one is simple: distraction reduction and productivity increases. Everything done while using this kind of setup is deliberate. There is no scrolling through pages upon pages of apps. There is no scrolling through Google Discover with story after story that you will probably never read. Instead between 3â7 app shortcuts are present, quick links to clock and calendar, and not much else. This setup requires you as the user to do an inventory of what apps you use the most. It really requires the user to rethink how they use their phone and what apps are the priority.
Omar Zahran (UX Collective)
A year ago, I wrote a post entitled Change your launcher, change your life about minimalist Android launchers. I’m now using the Before Launcher, because of the way you can easily and without any fuss customise notifications. Thanks to Ian O’Byrne for the heads-up in the We Are Open Slack channel.
Cow face pose is the yoga name for that stretch where one hand reaches down your back, and the other hand reaches up. (Thereâs a corresponding thing you do with your legs, but forget it for nowâweâre focusing on shoulders today.) If you canât reach your hands together, it feels like a challenging or maybe impossible pose.
Lifehacker UK
I was pretty shocked that I couldn’t barely do this with my right hand at the top and my left at the bottom. I was very shocked that I got nowhere near the other way around. It just goes to show that those people who work at home really need to work on back muscles and flexibility.
As someone who a) thinks Dr. Dre was an amazing producer, and b) read Dr. Seussâs Fox in Socks to his children roughly 1 million times (enough to be able to, eventually, get through the entire book at a comically high rate of speed w/o any tongue twisting slip-ups), I thought Wes Tankâs video of himself rapping Fox in Socks over Dreâs beats was really fun and surprisingly well done.
Jason Kottke
One of the highlights of my kids being a bit younger than they are now was to read Dr. Suess to them. Fox in Socks was my absolute tongue-twisting favourite! So this blew me away, and then when I went through to YouTube, the algorithm recommended Daniel Radcliffe (the Harry Potter star) rapping Blackalicious’ Alphabet Aerobics. Whoah.
Google is launching the free version of its Stadia game streaming service today. Anyone with a Gmail address can sign up, and Google is even providing a free two-month trial of Stadia Pro as part of the launch. It comes just two months after Google promised a free tier was imminent, and it will mean anyone can get access to nine titles, including GRID, Destiny 2: The Collection, and Thumper, free of charge.
Tom Warren (The Verge)
This is exactly the news I’ve been waiting for! Excellent.
Practicing simple creative acts on a regular basis can give you a psychological boost, according to a 2016 study in the Journal of Positive Psychology. A 2010 review of more than 100 studies of artâs impact on health revealed that pursuits like music, writing, dance, painting, pottery, drawing, and photography improved medical outcomes, mental health, social networks, and positive identity. It was published in the American Journal of Public Health.
Gwen Moran (Fast Company)
I love all of the artists on Twitter and Instagram giving people daily challenges. My family have been following along with some of them!
[R]esearchers at Norway’s Vestre Viken Hospital Trust and the University of Bergen conducted a small study to quantify the auditory experience of dreamers. Why? Because they wanted to “assess the relevance of dreaming as a model for psychosis.” Throughout history, they write, psychologists have considered dreamstates to be a model for psychosis, yet people experiencing psychosis usually suffer from auditory hallucinations far more than visual ones. Basically, what the researchers determined is that the reason so little is known about auditory sensations while dreaming is because, well, nobody asks what people’s dreams sound like.
David Pescovitz (Boing boing)
This makes sense, if you think about it. The advice for doing online video is always that you get the audio right first. It would seem that it’s the same for dreaming: that we pay attention more to what we ‘hear’ than what we ‘see’.
Humans canât stand being bored. Studies show weâll do just about anything to avoid it, from compulsive smartphone scrolling right up to giving ourselves electric shocks. And as emotions go, boredom is incredibly good at parting us from our money â weâll even try to buy our way out of the feeling with distractions like impulse shopping.
Erin Craig (BBC Travel)
The story in this article about a prisoner of war who dreamed up a daring escape is incredible, but does make the point that dreaming big when you’re locked down is a grat idea.
âWhat did you learn today,â is a fine question to ask. Particularly right this minute, when we have more time and less peace of mind than is usually the norm.
Itâs way easier to get someone to watchâa YouTube comic, a Netflix show, a movieâthan it is to encourage them to do something. But itâs the doing that allows us to become our best selves, and itâs the doing that creates our future.
It turns out that learning isnât in nearly as much demand as it could be. Our culture and our systems donât push us to learn. They push us to conform and to consume instead.
The good news is that each of us, without permission from anyone else, can change that.
Seth Godin
A timely, inspirational post from the always readable (and listen-worthy) Seth Godin.
This column has been in the works for some time, but my hope is that launching it during the pandemic will help you leverage a contemplative mindset while you have the time to think about what matters most to you. I hope this column will enrich your life, and equip you to enrich the lives of the people you love and lead.
Arthur C. Brooks (The atlantic)
A really handy way of looking at things, and I’m hoping that further articles in the series are just as good.
Images by Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck (they’re all over Giphy so I just went to the original source and used the hi-res versions)
I think it’s alright to say that this was a week when my spirits dropped a little. Apologies if that’s not what you wanted to hear right now, and if it’s reflected in what follows.
For there to be good things there must also be bad. For there to be joy there must also be sorrow. And for there to be hope there must be despair. All of this will pass.
But thereâs no reason to put too sunny a spin on whatâs happening. Research has shown that anticipation can be a linchpin of well-being and that looking ahead produces more intense emotions than retrospection. In a 2012 New York Times article on why people thirst for new experiences, one psychologist told the paper, âNovelty-seeking is one of the traits that keeps you healthy and happy and fosters personality growth as you age,â and another referred to human beings as a âneophilic species.â Of course, the current blankness in the place of what comes next is supposed to be temporary. Even so, lacking an ability to confidently say âsee you laterâ is going to have its effects. Have you noticed the way in which conversations in this era can quickly become recursive? You talk about the virus. Or you talk about what you did together long ago. The interactions donât always spark and generate as easily as they once did.
Spencer Kornhaber (The Atlantic)
Part of the problem with all of this is that we don’t know how long it’s going to last, so we can’t really make plans. It’s like an extended limbo where you’re supposed to just get on with it, whatever ‘it’ is…
If you’re going after a career moat now, remember that the best skills to go after are the ones that the market will value after the recession ends. You canât necessarily predict this â the world is complex and the future is uncertain, but you should certainly keep the general idea in mind.
A simpler version of this is to go after complementary skills to your current role. If you’ve been working for a bit, it’s likely that you’ll have a better understanding of your industry than most. So ask yourself: what complementary skills would make you more valuable to the employers in your job market?
Cedric James (Commonplace)
I’m fortunate to have switched from education to edtech at the right time. Elsewhere, James says that “job security is the ability to get your next job, not keep your current one” and that this depends on your network, luck, and having “rare and valuable skills”. Indeed.
This is hard stuff, and acknowledging it comes with a corollary: We, as a society, are not particularly special. Vinsel, the historian at Virginia Tech, cautioned against âdigital exceptionalism,â or the idea that everything is different now that the silicon chip has been harnessed for the controlled movement of electrons.
Itâs a difficult thing for people to accept, especially those who have spent their lives building those chips or the software they run. âJust on a psychological level,â Vinsel said, âpeople want to live in an exciting moment. Students want to believe theyâre part of a generation thatâs going to change the world through digital technology or whatever.â
Aaron Gordon (VICE)
Everyone thinks they live in ‘unprecedented’ times, especially if they work in tech.
But disasters and emergencies do not just throw light on the world as it is. They also rip open the fabric of normality. Through the hole that opens up, we glimpse possibilities of other worlds. Some thinkers who study disasters focus more on all that might go wrong. Others are more optimistic, framing crises not just in terms of what is lost but also what might be gained. Every disaster is different, of course, and itâs never just one or the other: loss and gain always coexist. Only in hindsight will the contours of the new world weâre entering become clear.
Peter C Baker (the Guardian)
An interesting read, outlining the optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. The coronavirus pandemic is a crisis, but of course what comes next (CLIMATE CHANGE) is even bigger.
This tendency to rally around even incompetent leaders makes one despair for humanity. The correct response in all cases is contempt and an attempt, if possible, at removal of the corrupt and venal people in charge. Certainly no one should be approving of the terrible jobs they [Cuomo, Trump, Johnson] have done.
All three have or will use their increased power to do horrible things. The Coronavirus bailout bill passed by Congress and approved by Trump is a huge bailout of the rich, with crumbs for the poor and middle class. So little, in fact, that there may be widespread hunger soon. Cuomo is pushing forward with his cuts, and Iâm sure Johnson will live down to expectations.
Ian Welsh
I’m genuinely shocked that the current UK government’s approval ratings are so high. Yes, they’re covering 80% of the salary of those laid-off, but the TUC was pushing for an even higher figure. It’s like we’re congratulating neoliberal idiots for destroying our collectively ability to be able to respond to this crisis effectively.
Yet ratcheting up surveillance to combat the pandemic now could permanently open the doors to more invasive forms of snooping later. It is a lesson Americans learned after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, civil liberties experts say.
Nearly two decades later, law enforcement agencies have access to higher-powered surveillance systems, like fine-grained location tracking and facial recognition â technologies that may be repurposed to further political agendas like anti-immigration policies. Civil liberties experts warn that the public has little recourse to challenge these digital exercises of state power.
Natasha Singer and Choe Sang-Hun (The New York Times)
I’ve seen a lot of suggestions around smarpthone tracking to help with the pandemic response. How, exactly, when it’s trivial to spoof your location? It’s just more surveillance by the back door.
Have you ever noticed that when you argue with someone smart, if you manage to debunk their initial reasoning, they just shift to a new, logical-sounding reason?
Reasons are like a salamanderâs legs â if you cut one off, another grows in its place.
When youâre dealing with a salamander, you need to get to the heart. Forget about reasoning and focus on whatâs causing the emotions. According to [non-violent communication], every negative emotion is the result of an unmet, universal need.
Dave bailey
Great advice here, especially for those who work in organisations (or who have clients) who lack emotional intelligence.
When the current crisis is over in terms of infection, the social and economic impact will be felt for a long time. One such hangover is likely to be the shift to online for so much of work and interaction. As the cartoon goes âthese meetings couldâve been emails all alongâ. So letâs jump forward then a few years when online is the norm.
Martin Weller (The Ed Techie)
Some of the examples given in this post gave me a much-needed chuckle.
However, now that many of us are finding we have time on our hands, it could be the opportunity we need to attempt some of the more chronologically demanding narrative video game masterpieces of the last decade.
Keith Stuart (The Guardian)
Well, yes, but what we probably need even more is multiplayer mode. Red Dead Redemption II is on this list, and it’s one of the best games ever made. However, it’s tinged with huge sadness for me as it’s a game I greatly enjoyed playing with the late, great, Dai Barnes.
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Header image by Alex Fu
I’ve tried to include some links here to other things here, but just like all roads read to Rome, all links eventually point to the pandemic.
I hope you and people that you care about are well. Stay safe, stay indoors, and let me know which of the following resonate with you!
Our stories about where inventiveness comes from, and how the future will be made, overwhelmingly focus on the power of the individual. Such stories appeal to the desire for human perfection (and redemption?) recast in technological language, and they were integral to the way that late-19th-century inventor-entrepreneurs, such as Tesla or Thomas Edison, presented themselves to their publics. Theyâre still very much part of the narrative of technological entrepreneurism now. Just as Tesla wanted to be seen as a kind of superhero of invention, unbound by conventional restraints, so too do his contemporary admirers at the cutting edge of the tech world. Superheroes resonate within that culture precisely because they embody in themselves the perception of technology as something that belongs to powerful and iconoclastic individuals. They epitomise the idea that technological culture is driven by outsiders. The character of Iron Man makes this very clear: after all, he really is a tech entrepreneur, his superpowers the product of the enhanced body armour he wears.
Iwan Rhys Morus (Aeon)
A really interesting read about the link between individualism, superheroes, technology, and innovation.
Blogging was then diffused into social media, but now social media is so tribal and algo-regulated that anybody with a real message today needs their own property. At the same time, professional institutions are increasingly suffocated by older, rent-seeking incumbents and politically-correct upstarts using moralism as a career strategy. In such a context, blogging â if it is intelligent, courageous, and consistent â is currently one of the most reliable methods for intellectually sophisticated individuals to accrue social and cultural capital outside of institutions. (Youtube for the videographic, Instagram for the photographic, podcasting for the loquacious, but writing and therefore blogging for the most intellectually sophisticated.)
Justin Murphy (Other LIfe)
I’ve been blogging since around 2004, so for sixteen years, and through all of my career to date. It’s the best and most enjoyable thing about ‘work’.
NASA expected its probe, dubbed âthe mole,â to dig its way through sand-like terrain. But because the Martian soil clumped together, the whole apparatus got stuck in place.
Programming InSightâs robotic arm to land down on the mole was a risky, last-resort maneuver, PopSci reports, because it risked damaging fragile power and communication lines that attached nearby. Thankfully, engineers spent a few months practicing in simulations before they made a real attempt.
Dan Robitzski (Futurism)
The idea of NASA engineers sending a signal to a distant probe to get it to hit itself, in the midst of a crisis on earth, made me chuckle this week.
Donât turn your office into a generic TV backdrop. Video is boring enough. The more you remove from the frame, the less visual data you are providing about who you are, where you live, how you work, and what you care about. If you were watching a remote interview with, say, Bong Joon-ho (the South Korean director of Parasite) would you want him sitting on a blank set with a ficus plant? Of course not. You would want to see him in his real office or studio. What are the posters on his wall? The books on his shelf? Who are his influences?
Douglas Rushkoff (OneZero)
Useful advice in this post from Douglas Rushkoff. I appreciate his reflection that, “every pixel is a chance to share information about your process and proclivities.”
On Twitter, people are finding ways to use the Zoom Rooms custom background feature to slap an image of themselves in their frames. You can record a short, looping video as your background, or take a photo of yourself looking particularly attentive, depending on the level of believability you’re going for. Zoom says it isn’t using any kind of video or audio analysis to track attention, so this is mostly for your human coworkers and boss’ sake. With one of these images on your background, you’re free to leave your seat and go make a sandwich while your boss thinks you’re still there paying attention:
Samantha Cole (Vice)
As an amusing counterpoint to the above article, I find it funny that people are using video backgrounds in this way!
There are lots of virtual event tools out there, like Google Hangouts, YouTube Live, Vimeo Live. For this guide Iâll delve into how to use Zoom specifically. However, a lot of the best practices explored here are broadly applicable to other tools. My goal is that reading this document will give you all the tools you need to be able to set up a meeting and host it on Zoom (or other platforms) in fun and interactive ways.
Alexa Kutler (Google Docs)
This is an incredible 28-page document that explains how to set up Zoom meetings for success. Highly recommended!
Elements of Asiaâs bio-surveillance revolution may not be as far off as citizens of Western democracies assume. On 24 March an emergency bill, which would relax limits on urgent surveillance warrants, went before the House of Lords. In any case, Britainâs existing Investigatory Powers Act already allows the state to seize mobile data if national security justifies it. In another sign that a new era in data rights is dawning, the EU is reviewing its recent white paper on AI regulation and delaying a review of online privacy rules. Researchers in both Britain (Oxford) and the US (MIT) are developing virus-tracking apps inviting citizens to provide movement data voluntarily. How desperate would the search for âneedles in haystacksâ have to get for governments to make such submissions compulsory? Israelâs draconian new regulations â which allegedly include tapping phone cameras and microphones â show how far down this road even broadly Western democracies might go to save lives and economies.
Jeremy Cliffe (New Statesman)
We need urgent and immediate action around the current criss. But we also need safeguards and failsafes so that we don’t end up with post-pandemic authoritarian regimes.
Soon enough, as hospitals around the world overflow with coronavirus patients, exhausting doctors, nurses, orderlies, custodians, medical supplies, ventilators and hospital cash accounts, doctors will have to make moral choices about who lives or dies. We should not supersede their judgment based on a false choice. Economic depression will come, regardless of how many we let die. The question is how long and devastating it will be.
Siva Vaidhyanathan (The Guardian)
Not exactly a fun read, but the truth is the world’s economy is shafted no matter which way we look at it. And as I tweeted the other day, there’s no real thing that exists, objectively speaking called ‘the economy’ which is separate from human relationships.
Pandemics can also catalyze social change. People, businesses, and institutions have been remarkably quick to adopt or call for practices that they might once have dragged their heels on, including working from home, conference-calling to accommodate people with disabilities, proper sick leave, and flexible child-care arrangements. âThis is the first time in my lifetime that Iâve heard someone say, âOh, if youâre sick, stay home,ââ says Adia Benton, an anthropologist at Northwestern University. Perhaps the nation will learn that preparedness isnât just about masks, vaccines, and tests, but also about fair labor policies and a stable and equal health-care system. Perhaps it will appreciate that health-care workers and public-health specialists compose Americaâs social immune system, and that this system has been suppressed.
Ed Yong (The Atlantic)
Much of this is a bit depressing, but I’ve picked up on the more positive bit towards the end. See also the article I wrote earlier this week: People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character
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Header image by Sincerely Media.
My bet is that you’ve spent most of this week reading news about the global pandemic. Me too. That’s why I decided to ensure it’s not mentioned at all in this week’s link roundup!
Let me know what resonates with you… đ·
My writing epiphany â which arrived decades into my writing career â was that even though there were days when the writing felt unbearably awful, and some when it felt like I was mainlining some kind of powdered genius and sweating it out through my fingertips, there was no relation between the way I felt about the words I was writing and their objective quality, assessed in the cold light of day at a safe distance from the day I wrote them. The biggest predictor of how I felt about my writing was how I felt about me. If I was stressed, underslept, insecure, sad, hungry or hungover, my writing felt terrible. If I was brimming over with joy, the writing felt brilliant.
Cory Doctorow (CBC)
Such great advice in here from the prolific Cory Doctorow. Not only is he a great writer, he’s a great speaker, too. I think both come from practice and clarity of thought.
Trends, micro-trends & edge cases.
This is a site that specialises in important and interesting news that is updated regularly, but not on an hour-by-hour (or even daily) basis. A wonderful antidote to staring at your social media feed for updates!
Thereâs actually a mountain of compelling evidence that the single most important ingredient for healthy, high-performing teams is simple: itâs trust. When Google famously crunched the data on hundreds of high-performing teams, they were surprised to find that one variable mattered more than any other: âemotional safety.â Also known as: âpsychological security.â Also known as: trust.
Matt Thompson
I used to work with Matt at Mozilla, and he’s a pretty great person to work alongside. He’s got a book coming out this year, and Laura (another former Mozilla colleague, but also a current co-op colleague!) drew my attention to this.
I’m an illustrator and I have always had a personal goal to draw all 62 US National Parks, but I wanted to find a unique twist for the project. When I found that there are one-star reviews for every single park, the idea for Subpar Parks was born. For each park, I hand-letter a line from the one-star reviews alongside my illustration of each park as my way of putting a fun and beautiful twist on the negativity.
Amber Share (Bored Panda)
I love this, especially as the illustrations are so beautiful and the comments so banal.
We know, for instance, that smartphone use is associated with depression in teens. Smartphone use certainly could be the culprit, but itâs also possible the story is more complicated; perhaps the causal relationship works the other way around, and depression drives teenagers to spend more time on their devices. Or, perhaps other details about their lifeâsay, their family background or level of physical activityâaffect both their mental health and their screen time. In short: Human behavior is messy, and measuring that behavior is even messier.
Jane C. Hu (Slate)
This, via Ian O’Byrne, is a useful read for anyone who deals with kids, especially teenagers.
For months, writers have been showering us with multiple, ongoing series of articles, all focused on different dimensions of open organizational theory and practice. That’s led to to a real embarrassment of richesâso many great pieces, so little time to catch them all.
So let’s take moment to reflect. If you missed one (or several) now’s your chance to catch up.
Bryan Behrenshausen (Opensource.com)
I’ve already shared some of the articles in this roundup, but I encourage you to check out the rest, and subscribe to opensource.com. It’s a great source of information and guidance.
Capitalism has always transformed people into latent resources, whether as labor to exploit for making products or as consumers to devour those products. But now, online services make ordinary people enact both roles: Twitter or Instagram followers for conversion into scrap income for an influencer side hustle; Facebook likes transformed into News Feed-delivery refinements; Tinder swipes that avoid the nuisance of the casual encounters that previously fueled urban delight. Every profile pic becomes a passerbyâno need for an encounter, even.
Ian Bogost (The Atlantic)
An amazing piece of writing, in which Ian Bogost not only surveys previous experiences with ‘strangers’ but applies it to the internet. As he points out, there is a huge convenience factor in not knowing who made your sandwich. I’ve pointed out before that capitalism is all about scale, and at the end of the day, caring doesn’t scale, and scaling doesn’t care.
We desire quality moments and to make quality memories. It’s tempting to think that we can create quality time just by designating it so, such as via a vacation. That generally ends up backfiring due to our raised expectations being let down by reality. If we expect that our vacation is going to be perfect, any single mistake ruins the experience
In contrast, you are likely to get a positive surprise when you have low expectations, which is likely the case during a “normal day”. Itâs hard to match perfection, and easy to beat normal. Because of this, it’s more likely quality moments come out of chance
If you can’t engineer quality time, and it’s more a matter of random events, it follows that you want to increase how often such events happen. You can’t increase the probability, but you can increase the duration for such events to occur. Put another way, you want to increase quantity of time, and not engineer quality time.
Leon Lin (Avoid boring people)
There’s a lot of other interesting-but-irrelevant things in this newsletter, so scroll to the bottom for the juicy bit. I’ve quoted the most pertinent point, which I definitely agree with. There’s wisdom in Gramsci’s quotation about having “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”.
The prodigal tech bro doesnât want structural change. He is reassurance, not revolution. Heâs invested in the status quo, if we can only restore the foundersâ purity of intent. Sure, we got some things wrong, he says, but thatâs because we were over-optimistic / moved too fast / have a growth mindset. Just put the engineers back in charge / refocus on the original mission / get marketing out of the c-suite. Government âneeds to step upâ, but just enough to level the playing field / tweak the incentives. Because the prodigal techbro is a moderate, centrist, regular guy. Dammit, heâs a Democrat. Those others who said years ago what heâs telling you right now? Theyâre troublemakers, disgruntled outsiders obsessed with scandal and grievance. He gets why you ignored them. Hey, he did, too. He knows you want to fix this stuff. But itâs complicated. It needs nuance. He knows youâll listen to him. Dude, heâs just like youâŠ
Maria Farrell (The Conversationalist)
Now that we’re experiencing something of a ‘techlash’ it’s unsurprising that those who created surveillance capitalism have had a ‘road to Damascus’ experience. That doesn’t mean, as Maria Farrell points out, that we should all of a sudden consider them to be moral authorities.
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Last week, I tweeted this:
I get the feeling that, between film and TV shows on Netflix, Amazon deliveries, and social interaction on Twitter and Mastodon, beyond close friends and family, no-one would even realise if I’d been quarantined.
Writing in The Atlantic, Ian Bogost points out that Every Place Is the Same Now, because you go to every place with your personal screen, a digital portal to the wider world.
Anywhere has become as good as anywhere else. The office is a suitable place for tapping out emails, but so is the bed, or the toilet. You can watch television in the denâbut also in the car, or at the coffee shop, turning those spaces into impromptu theaters. Grocery shopping can be done via an app while waiting for the kidsâ recital to start. Habits like these compress time, but they also transform space. Nowhere feels especially remarkable, and every place adopts the pleasures and burdens of every other. Itâs possible to do so much from home, so why leave at all?
Ian Bogost (The Atlantic)
If you’re a knowledge worker, someone who deals with ideas and virtual objects rather than things in ‘meatspace’, then there is nothing tying you to a particular geographical place. This may be liberating, but it’s also quite… weird.
Itâs easy but disorienting, and it makes the home into a very strange space. Until the 20th century, one had to leave the house for almost anything: to work, to eat or shop, to entertain yourself, to see other people. For decades, a family might have a single radio, then a few radios and a single television set. The possibilities available outside the home were far greater than those within its walls. But now, itâs not merely possible to do almost anything from homeâitâs also the easiest option. Our forebearsâ problem has been inverted: Now home is a prison of convenience that we need special help to escape.
Ian Bogost (The Atlantic)
I’ve worked from home for the last eight years, and now can’t imagine going back to working any other way. Granted, I get to travel pretty much every month, but that 95% being-at-home statistic still includes my multi-day international trips.
I haven’t watched it recently, but in 2009 a film called Surrogates starring Bruce Willis foreshadowed the kind of world we’re creating. Here’s the synopsis via IMDB:
People are living their lives remotely from the safety of their own homes via robotic surrogates â sexy, physically perfect mechanical representations of themselves. It’s an ideal world where crime, pain, fear and consequences don’t exist. When the first murder in years jolts this utopia, FBI agent Greer discovers a vast conspiracy behind the surrogate phenomenon and must abandon his own surrogate, risking his life to unravel the mystery.
IMDB
If we replace the word ‘robotic’ with ‘virtual’ in this plot summary, then it’s a close approximation to the world in which some of us now live. Facetuned Instagram selfies project a perfect life. We construct our own narratives and then believe the story we have concocted. Everything is amazing but no-one’s happy.
Even Zoom, the videoconferencing software I use most days for work, has an option to smooth out wrinkles, change your background, and make everything look a bit more sparkly. Our offline lives can be gloriously mundane, but online, thanks to various digital effects, we can make them look glorious. And why wouldn’t we?
I think we’ll see people and businesses optimising for how they look and sound online, including recruitment. The ability to communicate effectively at a distance with people who you may never meet in person is a skill that’s going to be in high demand, if it isn’t already.
Remote working may be a trend, but one which is stubbornly resisted by some bosses who are convinced they have to keep a close eye on employees to get any work out of them.
However, when those bosses are forced to implement remote working policies to keep their businesses afloat, and nothing bad happens as a result, this attitude can, and probably will, change. Remote working, when done properly, is not only more cost-effective for businesses, but often leads to higher productivity and self-reported worker happiness.
Being ‘good in the room‘ is fine, and I’m sure it will always be highly prized, but I also see confident, open working practices as something that’s rising in perceived value. Chairing successful online meetings is at least as important as chairing ones offline, for example. We need to think of ways of being able recognise these remote working skills, as it’s not something in which you can receive a diploma.
For workers, of course, there are so many benefits of working from home that I’m not even sure where to start. Your health, relationships, and happiness are just three things that are likely to dramatically improve when you start working remotely.
For example, let’s just take the commute. This dominates the lives of non-remote workers, usually taking an hour or more out of a their day â every day. Commuting is tiring and inconvenient, but people are currently willing to put up with long commutes to afford a decently-sized house, or to live in a nicer area.
So, let’s imagine that because of the current pandemic (which some are calling the world’s biggest remote-working experiment) businesses decide that having their workers being based from home has multi-faceted benefits. What happens next?
Well, if a large percentage (say we got up to ~50%) of the working population started working remotely over the next few months and years, this would have a knock-on effect. We’d see changes in:
…to name but a few. I think it would be a huge net benefit for society, and hopefully allow for much greater civic engagement and democratic participation.
I’ll conclude with a quotation from Nafeez Ahmed’s excellent (long!) post on what he’s calling a global phase shift. Medium says it’s a 30-minute read, but I reckon it’s about half that.
Ahmed points out in stark detail the crisis, potential future scenarios, and the opportunity we’ve got. I particularly appreciate his focus on the complete futility of what he calls “a raw, âfend for yourselfâ approach”. We must work together to solve the world’s problems.
The coronavirus outbreak is, ultimately, a lesson in not just the inherent systemic fragilities in industrial civilization, but also the limits of its underlying paradigm. This is a paradigm premised on a specific theory of human nature, the neoclassical view of Homo-Economicus, human beings as dislocated units which compete with each other to maximise their material self-gratification through endless consumption and production. That paradigm and its values have brought us so far in our journey as a species, but they have long outlasted their usefulness and now threaten to undermine our societies, and even our survival as a species.
Getting through coronavirus will be an exercise not just in building societal resilience, but relearning the values of cooperation, compassion, generosity and kindness, and building systems which institutionalize these values. It is high time to recognize that such ethical values are not simply human constructs, products of socialization. They are cognitive categories which reflect patterns of behaviour in individuals and organizations that have an evolutionary, adaptive function. In the global phase shift, systems which fail to incorporate these values into their structures will eventually die.
Nafeez Ahmed
Just as crises can be manufactured by totalitarian regimes to seize power and control populations, perhaps natural crises can be used to make us collectively realise we need to pull together?
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Header image by pan xiaozhen. Anonymous quotation-as-title taken from Scott Klososky’s The Velocity Manifesto
